Monday April 27, 2015 • Howard Tayler

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a bit of Ben McSweeney's preliminary line-art from the Planet Mercenary RPG weapon section:

Here's the draft text that goes along with it:

[REDACTED] AutocutleryChainsaber Mark IX

Most civilizations invented power cutting tools long after they dispensed with swords in favor of firearms, and most civilizations became briefly fascinated with those cutting tools as a way to bring the sword back. And for most civilizations it ended there.

Along came [REDACTED] Autocutlery with a bad idea to make good money: they would, with actionable deliberation and insufficient testing, weaponize the chainsaw. The result was the Chainsaber line of weapons, none of which is as effective, gram for gram, as a firearm. But the grunts want to swing chainsaws at things, and the Chainsaber Mark I took off plenty of enemy limbs and friendly fingers, so the product line and most of the customers survived, and eventually we got the Chainsaber Mark IX (The Mark V is pictured above.)

The Mark IX has numerous available grips, each of which is designed to maximize the leverage of the gripping limb while putting the weapon’s center of mass in just the right place for deft swinging. It is surprisingly light, and when fitted correctly is even more surprisingly difficult to kill oneself with. Maim? Still easy.

But let’s be honest with ourselves here. The only place the Mark IX chainsaber is deployed is with companies who want to make a lot of noise and throw a lot of gore in order to take the fight out of an ostensibly stronger opponent. When this works, bully! When this doesn’t work? You get the opposite of “bully,” and while a lot of words mean that, you should pick one which also means “we got cut to pieces with our own toys.”

Would you like more pages of delicious material like this? Back the Planet Mercenary RPG on Kickstarter, and you'll have two hundred pages of this stuff, including illustrations, maps, deck plans, and yes, rules for bringing a chainsaber to a gunfight.